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In August 1939 — 75 years ago this week — Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In the wake of the Russo-German alliance, newspaper wits coined the term “ComunNazi.” Communist-Nazi. Yes, “red” and “brown” entwined as the dictatorships they are.

The two dictators' legions of liars hailed the deal as a peace treaty. Peace? Eastern Europeans in the dictators' gun sights scorned the falsehood.

“Peace in our time,” Neville Chamberlain had proclaimed after the wretched Munich deal of 1938, which gave Hitler permission to annex slices of Czechoslovakia. Of course, when given a slice, Hitler annexed the whole.

For expansionist dictators, peace is war by other means, and the other means always involve deception.

On Aug. 31, 1939, with the ink barely dry on the dictators' peace pact, Germany conducted a “false flag” operation. Pretending to be Poles, German soldiers launched a fake assault on a German border station. On Sept. 1, Hitler's panzers began to roll toward Warsaw. On, Sept. 17, without a formal declaration of war, Stalin's Red Army “forces of international socialism” attacked Poland from the east.

In fall 1939, after the German and Russian invasion of Poland, the Nazis and Communists absorbed Polish territory into their respective states.

Lies, vehement denial, propaganda, plausible deniability, a “so what” shrug — the tools Hitler and Stalin used are not artifacts of 1939. This year provides us with a bitter example. Former KGB colonel and Stalin heir, Vladimir Putin, is invading Ukraine by increment.

Thanks to him, annexation is not a 1930s artifact. In March 2014, Putin's Kremlin annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.

“CommunNazi” disappeared in 1941 when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. We need to apply it to Putin. Whether he governs as a “national socialist” or simply runs the Kremlin as a criminal oligarchy is of little matter; he has effective control of the Russian economy. He also exercises state control of culture and media.

Until the July 2014 shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, Kremlin spin managed to confuse just enough people in the West to prevent the formation of an anti-Putin front. German Chancellor Angela Merkel claims that will change.

After the MH17 disaster, the Kremlin claimed that Ukrainians fired the missile and perhaps — just perhaps — they were trying to shoot down an airliner carrying President Putin!

Outlandish? Of course. However, dictators employ “the big lie of the moment” because, with certain groups of useful idiots, it works.

The lies continue, however. When an infiltrating column of armored vehicles was intercepted this past week (Aug. 25, 2014), the Kremlin tried a kind-of-big lie.

Ukrainian security forces captured 10 Russian paratroopers who were in an armored vehicle column and released on video the statement of a Russian corporal. According to the Voice of America, the corporal told his captors he served in the Russian Army's elite, special operations-capable 331st Airborne Regiment. He described a common infiltration tactic: “We traveled here (i.e., Ukraine) in columns not along the roads but across the fields.”

Kremlin propagandists, however, blamed a navigation error. The Russian Army column had been patrolling the border zone and crossed the section “into Ukraine by accident.” An “aw, shucks, no big deal” big lie. Or perhaps a play on Peter Pan — you know, Lost Boys?